YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN! INSIDE OUT UPSIDE DOWN.

You must be “Born Again.”

Effective personal transformation is not a product of the mind, but of the human spirit.  When the human spirit opens up to the Spirit of God, a new life is born.  The Mat 6:33 Imperative is the atmosphere in which this new life takes a lungful of oxygen, and develops towards its God given destiny.

The human spirit, and the human mind are not same; the spirit is the being in us created in the image of God, and the mind is the rational seat of that being.  Christ taught that, ^{Jn 4:24} “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”  We are created in the image of God, as scripture says, ^{Ge 1:27(TNIV)} “So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”   Our connection with God is Spirit to spirit.  When we reduce God to the limitations of our environment, we end up with religion, as Paul wrote, ^{2Ti 3:5} “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”  Only spirit can understand Spirit.

It is common knowledge that every living species will give birth to its own kind, and even more that the physical body we focus on so much, Christ came to restore the original “Being” in which we were created.  Paul said, ^{Ac 17:28} ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’  As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’  To be born of the Spirit is to be born of God.

That recognition is essentially a restoration of the human being’s authority over nature and environment.  We were created to reign—to act upon, and not to be acted upon.  Scripture says, ^{Ge 1:26(TNIV)} Then God said, “Let us make the human being in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

In the Genesis creation narrative, Adam and Eve had a spiritual relationship with God, and the serpent reduced that to an environmental relationship.  This is the precise point where our anxiety was introduced, ^{Ge 3:19} “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”  Since then, success is measured in terms of pleasure, power, possession, and achievement. 

When we are “born again,” our spiritual relationship with God is restored, and our relationship with the environment changes.  We are defined—not by the environment and its success indicators—but by a rich and dynamic relationship with Christ in God.

That truth is what Nicodemus could not walk away from; to be “born again” meant giving up known idols for the Truth.  His idols were not so conspicuous because they were disguised in religion.  As a veteran Pharisee, he was used to a sense of power covered and flowered with god-talk. 

Pharisees adhered more to their interpretations, than to the God they were interpreting.  To be sure, whatever they did was more about them than it was about God.  Nicodemus’ idol was exposed because his constituency had discovered a sterner truth.  It is better to discover the truth about you, before your lie is exposed.  The worn-out cliché is true, “You can lie to some people some of the time, but you can’t lie to all the people all of the time.”  Your sin will find you out.

Traditionally, Nicodemus worked his way backwards to his ancestors, which was more rational than spiritual, but this new challenge was about working forward and spiritual.  The challenge of the Mat 6:33 Imperative is about the future, not the past—and the future needs a new attitude.  Paul reminded the Ephesians that they needed, ^{Eph 4:23}”… to be made new in the attitude of your minds…” in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus Christ (V.21).

The Mat 6:33 Imperative is an invitation to return to the depth of our innermost, and to search and constantly probe our reason for being.  To search for one’s life-long aspiration; one’s deepest and best hope of what one’s life might be.  Nelson Mandela and his comrades were kept alive in prison by nothing less than the “Ideal” of a just and democratic South Africa.  Martin Luther King was motivated by his “Dream” of human equality in the United States of America.  WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE?